Building a Sustainable Internet of Things: Energy-Efficient Routing Using Low-Power Sensors Will Meet the Need

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a framework built as a network of trillions of devices (called things) communicating with each other to offer innovative solutions to real-time problems. These devices monitor the physical environment and disseminate collected data back to the base station. In many cases, the sensor nodes have limited resources like energy, memory, low computational speed, and communication bandwidth. In this network scenario, sensors near the data collector drain energy faster than other nodes in the network. A mobile sink is a solution in sensor networks in which the network is balanced with node energy consumption by using a mobile sink in the sensing area. However, the position of the mobile sink instigates packet overhead and energy consumption. This article discusses a novel data-routing technique to forward data toward a base station using a mobile data collector, in which two data collectors follow a predefined path to collect data by covering the entire network. The proposed technique improves the network performance, including energy consumption and sensing area lifetime.